The New Desktop App

[dan]

UPDATE - May 5th, 2023

Hey folks,

We appreciate the feedback you've provided us with regarding the new desktop UI; it's being taken into account!

We're chiming in to redirect you to the current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 

Thanks!

UPDATE - April 16th, 2021

Hey folks,

We've tried to cover most of the frequently asked questions concerning the new update in this Spotify Answer - Make sure to check it out!

We'll continue to go through all your posts in this blog, so if you have any other questions besides the ones in the FAQ, feel free to add them in a comment below.

Thanks,

The Community Moderator Team

UPDATE - April 8th, 2021

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday we published a blog post on our engineering blog which goes into more details on the new UI, the reasons behind it and the process of building it.  If you'd like to read a few more details like that you can check it out here.

I'd also like to mention a few things coming in upcoming versions of Desktop

• We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI.  We expect this to land in an upcoming release, so do watch this space and make sure you remain fully updated.
• "Discovered On" playlists for artists will be back in an upcoming release.
• We're working on bringing to Desktop the ability (like in our mobile apps) to see all the saved songs by a particular artist from within the artist page itself.  Again this will be arriving in an upcoming Desktop release.

Thanks,
Dan

ORIGINAL POST -----

Hi everyone

Dan here from the Desktop team again. I wanted to make another post to once again thank you all for your continued feedback, and also give a little more detail about what we’re doing from here on in.

In short, the new user interface is the future of the Spotify Desktop client, and over the coming weeks we’ll roll out the new UI to all Desktop users. Many of you will have noticed already, but we’ve based the new experience on the more modern and scalable Web Player codebase, and in doing so made both versions more aligned and easier to use than ever before.

Why are we making this change?

We believe in the future of the Desktop platform and want to make sure it can still serve the needs of our users now and into the future. 

The existing Desktop UI codebase became increasingly hard to maintain as time went on, and you may have noticed a growing gap between the Desktop and Mobile apps in some cases. For those of you interested in the technical details, a blog post on the engineering blog is coming soon. The short story, however, is that our desire to continue pushing Desktop forward and bringing new features to it became incompatible with the reality of maintaining the legacy experience.

Meanwhile, we had a Web Player serving similar user needs, but built in a much more modern and scalable way — with a more cohesive Spotify “look & feel”. We therefore resolved to use the Web Player UI code as the basis for both Web and Desktop in the future, and have been spending quite some bringing the Desktop-class features that you’ve come to expect to this shared platform. You’ve had a sneak peek of this as we’ve been testing and building things out, so once again I’d like to thank you for both being a part of it and giving great feedback on this thread that has definitely helped us improve.

Benefits of this approach

Firstly, I’d like to say that this really is a new beginning for the Desktop app. Long-term Desktop users will start to notice more rapid iteration on the app than they’ve seen in the past.

I’d like to call out some of the things in the new Desktop, and also give you a little taste of what’s to come.

Design - We’ve focused on consistency, are using more color to enhance the experience where appropriate, and are making better use of cover art and album images in the app. We're also better aligned to other platforms, put an increased focus on accessibility, interactions and animations, and have tightened up our design language, so it’s more in line with what users have come to expect from Spotify.

Functionality - We’ve brought the functionality that users expect from Desktop, like sorting/filtering, drag & drop, and advanced settings and options, whilst improving areas like playlist creation and curation, profile pages, and more. In many cases these improvements have landed in the Web Player, so the work here has benefited our combined users on both platforms.

Tip! You’ll also find new keyboard shortcuts for many tasks (press ctrl+? to see them) which makes certain actions much faster and easier for any user.

We are also aware that there are a few aspects raised in the community that haven't been fully addressed as part of this update, but items like the Search Bar and discography on artist pages have ultimately been brought closer in line with other Spotify applications. That said, we will continue to iterate on the experience across both platforms moving forward.

The future of Desktop

As mentioned above, this change to the Desktop UI gives us the ability to move faster in bringing you new improvements, features and functionality — so you can expect to see continued improvements to the client in the weeks and months to come.

Once again, I’d like to thank you all for helping us shape the Desktop App over the past year on behalf of everyone here at Spotify, and please do continue to post your feedback and use our Ideas section here in the Community to tell us what you’d like to see and why.

Thanks again,

Dan

[hpmagui]

With the new version of the application, it is no longer possible to filter the playlists when you want to add a title to an already created playlist (right click, add to playlist).

So, when you have several hundred playlists, it is impossible to add a title, because you will not browse all the names to find the right one....

With the old version, there was no filter field displayed, but it was enough to type the first letters of the playlist in order to filter the drop-down list directly.

It's a big regression....

[JT298]

Seriously, what madness made you remove the artist filtering as standard, and what made you prioritze album and duration over date added? I absolutely do not care at all about the album name or the track duration in the main view. I want to filter by artist name and date added - that is it. Please, as someone who's invested years of subs and curation in your app, please don't make it less user-friendly to me.

[BigDoggeTom]

The update is alright, but it's far too concise. It's now an extra click to navigate anywhere, such as your library items, radio, individual artist's songs, etc. This was one of the reasons I joined Spotify instead of staying with YouTube Music (though at least Spotify loads quickly, so there's no waiting in between each of the many button clicks)

The biggest problem is the removal of the old radio. Playlist radios suck, but at least I could still drag a song to it and get a different set of songs each time. Now every I'm stuck with playlist radios that are consistently the same each time

[st0rmtrooperx]

Just saw the new desktop update and this seems like a step backwards in a lot of ways. I've only used it for maybe a half hour and I'm hating it. I'm going to agree with a lot of people here, this is BAD.

• We need the artist column back. Having it in the same column as the song name makes it a lot harder to identify who the song is by, it's very cluttered. The change makes sense for mobile view but for desktop it's unnecessary. There is now a lot of empty whitespace that could be used for an artist column. I don't care about album or duration columns as much as I do as the artist and date added columns. Bring the artist column back please.
• I read the comment about bringing a list discography back. PLEASE DO THAT! I like going to an artist's page and seeing all their albums and singles in order and being able to scroll through all the songs on each album, this helps discovering new music by the artists much easier. Your new discography view isn't even in order on the artist's page unless you click "See All" and then I still have to click on an album again from that view to see the songs. So many clicks compared to the old view. Just bring back the old artist page view!! This change is a step in the complete wrong direction.
• Search bar needs to go back to the top! Having an extra click to get to the search makes no sense. 

[ninotztan]

The new update broke spotify for me. I'm on Windows 10, using spotify for the desktop, and am experiencing the following problems:

• Songs more often than not won't load. I get a message saying, "Spotify can't play this right now. If you have the file on your computer, you can import it." I know that my internet works well enough to play songs since I always would before the update
• Playlists, more specifically the release radar and discover weekly, won't load. They take a long time, then I guess the connection times out and just says that it couldn't find the playlist
• When those playlists do load, they are often not complete. The banner says that it is 30 songs long, and give a time significantly less than expected for 30 songs. Actually looking at the songs in the playlist shows that there are only 5 or so songs
• These problems persist after closing and reopening spotify, reopening spotify after restarting the computer, uninstalling and reinstalling, and reinstalling after restarting my computer.

I also used to play around with the host file in the past, so I figured that maybe I still have something there that is messing with spotify right now, but when I went to check, the host file was empty.